In recent years, Internet security threats have increased at an alarming rate, yet only a small fraction of the traffic served by Web servers is encrypted. This is primarily due to the high computational overhead of encryption. With the addition of Advanced Encryption Standard New Instructions (AES-NI), computational overhead can be signigicantly reduced with accelerating performance.

Intel conducted tests on Web servers serving encypted data to quantify the benefits of AES-NI and found that AES-NI reduced computational overhead of encyrption by 50 percent. Continue reading this paper to learn more about the tests and results.